"Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant"
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Stupidity, for Flaubert, isn’t a temporary lapse or a lack of information. It’s a material force: granite. That image does double work. First, it makes stupidity feel geologic, older than argument, indifferent to persuasion. Second, it indicts the person trying to fight it. If you “attack” granite barehanded, you don’t prove your strength; you prove your naïveté. The line carries a bitter warning to the intellectual: the world will not be improved simply because you’ve noticed what’s wrong with it.
Flaubert’s intent is less to sneer at the masses than to expose the vanity embedded in moral crusades and salon debates. He came up in a 19th-century France swollen with bourgeois self-satisfaction, political slogans, and the idea that progress was mostly a matter of saying the right enlightened things. His novels, especially Madame Bovary, are obsessed with how clichés and received ideas colonize people’s inner lives. “Stupidity” here is that automation of thought: the reflex to repeat what’s socially approved, to substitute formula for perception.
The subtext is quietly brutal: truth doesn’t win by being true. In fact, the attempt to correct foolishness can end up strengthening it, because stupidity is armored by certainty and social comfort, while critique is fragile, interpersonal, and exhausting. Granite doesn’t argue back; it just outlasts you. In a single metaphor, Flaubert turns the cultured impulse to “set people straight” into a tragicomic spectacle of self-injury.
Flaubert’s intent is less to sneer at the masses than to expose the vanity embedded in moral crusades and salon debates. He came up in a 19th-century France swollen with bourgeois self-satisfaction, political slogans, and the idea that progress was mostly a matter of saying the right enlightened things. His novels, especially Madame Bovary, are obsessed with how clichés and received ideas colonize people’s inner lives. “Stupidity” here is that automation of thought: the reflex to repeat what’s socially approved, to substitute formula for perception.
The subtext is quietly brutal: truth doesn’t win by being true. In fact, the attempt to correct foolishness can end up strengthening it, because stupidity is armored by certainty and social comfort, while critique is fragile, interpersonal, and exhausting. Granite doesn’t argue back; it just outlasts you. In a single metaphor, Flaubert turns the cultured impulse to “set people straight” into a tragicomic spectacle of self-injury.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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